In a distinct difference between Microsoft Active Server Pages
(ASP) and ASP.NET, ASP.NET no longer impersonates the authenticated
user by default. To enable impersonation, you must set the
impersonate attribute of the identity section in
the Web.config file to true.

You can "tamper-proof" your viewstate to reduce the likelihood
of someone trying to spoof your application by setting the
EnableViewStateMAC attribute. If necessary you can
encrypt it too.

However, by default, ASP.NET creates a random validation key and
stores it in each server's Local Security Authority (LSA). In order
to validate a ViewState field created on another server, the
validationKey for both servers must be set to the same
value. If you secure ViewState by any of the means listed above for
an application running in a Web Farm configuration, you will need
to provide a single, shared validation key for all of the
servers.

Report.NET is a
powerful library that will help you to generate PDF documents in a
simple and flexible manner. The document can be created with data
that have been retrieved from any ADO.NET data set. The Report.NET
library is available for free under the LGPL license
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/report).

HTTP compression provides faster transmission time between
compression-enabled browsers and IIS. You can either compress
static files alone, or both static files and applications. If your
network bandwidth is restricted, you should consider HTTP
compression, at least for static files, unless your processor
utilization is already extremely high.

When IIS receives a request, it checks to see if the browser is
compression-enabled. IIS then checks the file name extension to see
if the requested file is a static file or contains dynamic content.
If the file contains static content, IIS checks to see if the file
has previously been requested and is already stored in a compressed
format in the temporary compression directory. If the file is not
stored in a compressed format, IIS sends the uncompressed file to
the browser, and adds a compressed copy of the file to the
temporary compression directory. If the file is stored in a
compressed format, IIS sends the compressed file to the browser. No
files are compressed until they have been requested once by a
browser.

If the file contains dynamic content, IIS compresses the file as
it is generated and sends the compressed file to the browser. No
copy of the file is stored.

I've recently bought an S-VIDEO cable for my laptop that allows
me to use my laptop as a DVD player through my VCR or TV without
everyone having to huddle around the LCD display. In order to do
this, I have to fiddle with the display settings and this
invariably ends up scattering my nicely arranged desktop icons over
the screen.

I decided to find a way to save the positions of the icons so
that they could be restored and I've created a
little applet that does just that (C++ source included). The
basic applet saves to stdout and loads from stdin so use it as
follows:

vtdskico -save > myicons.txt

vtdskico -load < myicons.txt

The core of the save/restore functionality is in the
DesktopView.h file so feel free to reuse that class if you feel so
inclined. :o)

"While I doubt there is anything particular about high isolation
mode that would cause problems for ASP.NET, I would feel better if
you were to use low isolation. The recommended configuration is
<processModel enable="true"/> and low isolation mode selected
in IIS metabase."

"The first thing to notice is that the .NET Framework will not
run at all on Windows 95. This is consistent with other
Microsoft® products like Microsoft® Office XP that also
do not support Windows 95."

The chemist-turned-cool-Holocaust-memoir-writer Primo Levi has a
story about a time he was working at a chemical plant that made
varnish. He was surprised to find that in addition to the chemicals
he expected, the varnish formula also called for a raw onion. At
first, he could find no reason as to why a raw onion had to be
added; there wasn't anything in onions that was needed in varnish,
and even if there were, a single onion would be too little for a
large industrial vat.

After doing a little research, Levi found out that his
predecessors used to toss an onion into the varnish as a simple and
inexpensive way of testing its temperature. If the mixture was hot
enough, the onion would fry. With modern equipment, the need for
the onion had vanished, but for reasons they no longer knew, it had
become part of the recipe.

My advice to Microsoft is to abandon the browser. The browser is
a red herring; it's a dead end. The idea of having batched
processing inside a very stupid program that's controlled remotely
is a software architecture that was invented about 25 years ago by
IBM, and was abandoned about 20 years ago because it's a bad
architecture. We've gone tremendously retrograde by bringing in Web
browsers.

Okay, it's a bit out of date, but still a relevant comment. Will
Microsoft's decision to have portable software from the web
disabled by default as of .NET SP1 rail against this?

Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP
connections inside SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) available on both
Unix and Windows. Stunnel can allow you to secure non-SSL aware
daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel
provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon's
code.